MARGIE
I don’t know. You seem like something’s on your mind.
JOE
Nothing’s on my mind, all right? Stop fishing. Nothing’s going to come of it, Margie.
“Cut!”
“Tell them I dropped an earring,” Susie whispers, and ducks behind the bar to vomit into a small trash can.
“Can you see it?” Orson says, for anyone who might be listening. “Did it maybe go under?”
Most people are disappearing into the labyrinth of sets, setting up for the next tape, but Marion from makeup is watching, pursing her lips. Below him, Susie is wiping her mouth with a roll of paper towel, clearing her throat, and saying “Got it!” Marion hums and waves slightly to Orson before floating off as well.
Susan groans, pulls herself up on the counter, Orson passes her a bottle of water.
“It’s worse in the afternoons,” she says.
“At least you’re done for today.”
“I might have to do that pickup.”
“They won’t get to it.”
“They might.”
He takes in her pale face, the sour smell on her breath. “I’ll get rid of that,” he says, pointing to the bag full of sick.
“No, I can. My mess.”
“My bar,” he says, looking around the set that has hardly changed since he started filming almost three years ago. And hasn’t he made it his own? Outside the thick stained-glass door, a neon sign reading “Joe’s.”Inside, the chairs stacked up on the tables where he left them at the end of the scene. How many times has he stacked those chairs, has he swept these floors? In this corner he broke up a fight, in that one, consoled the matriarch after her third divorce.The wisdom of youth, Rip used to say, winking at him, but Orson is hardly so young as he was then.
He takes the bin out of Susie’s hand, ties up the bag, and strides through the tangle of equipment rolling to its next destination and people calling for a bit of tape or powder, pushes out through the exit, and chucks it into one of the industrial waste bins in the back lot. He has time for a quick smoke before his next take and thinks, as he often does, how like life this all is, how you only get one shot at things.
All the work he’s done behind the scenes is starting to pay off. Just think: three years of putting it in with Flowers, of listening to him talk about his ex-girlfriend and the guy who backed into his car and looking with him through the headshots of blond, barely-of-age extras. Even for all that, the idea for the secret admirer was all Susie, who sweet-talked Rip into trying it out.Fans want to see more of him, she said, and it turns out she was right. Finally, Orson has his own storyline. Finally, he’s been offered an actual contract, promoted from a recurring day player. He’s been told more than once he’s part of the family, which makes him feel grateful as well as neglectful, because isn’t he missing his niece and nephew growing up, and the cold Highland winters?
When he comes back in, he catches Susie on the way back to her dressing room, looking like she is going to collapse. “Suze,” he whispers. “Sooner or later.”
Susie looks at him with her eyes full of something he has never felt, something he has hardly had to perform and isn’t sure he could. “They’ll fire me.”
“They won’t.”
“Mark will fire me out of spite.”
A new assistant director hurries by with a clipboard, asks them where to find one of the sets. “By the train station,” they answer in unison. Everyone knows how to find the train station.
It had shocked him when Susie told him last week, her eyes shining. She was making him dinner, their Thursday ritual.I have to tell you something, she said, and he felt the bottom drop out of the universe. Not that he had thought it impossible. He knew about pregnant women, twice watched his sister transform into a supernatural creature and back into a mortal. But this is different. Susie is a friend—perhaps his best friend. He relies on her. He’d felt almost betrayed, as though she’d begun a journey she could not take him on, and embarrassed. He should be happy for her.
“What do you think is going to happen if you wait?” he says.
“I don’t know. Maybe they won’t notice?” she pauses, expecting him to laugh. He doesn’t. “I just need time to think.”
“Well, time isn’t on your side.”
“I can’t lose this,” she says, and he’s not sure whether she’s referring to the job or the thing inside her. She is looking at him, pleading, and he knows this much; she hates having to ask for help.
“Okay,” he says, a plan coming together in his mind. “Let’s see what we can do.”
